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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. To what does the narrator compare Gin's mother's rosary?
2. In the story's opening, what details are related to the characters' social circumstances?
3. What technique is employed in the phrase "and justice for all" (234)?
4. What kind of buildings are on the lovers' lane?
5. In what sense is the drowned woman also still constantly in the narrator's thoughts?
Short Essay Questions
1. What plot events--one immediate and one later--are foreshadowed by the narrator's description of "the bodies of lovers...visible in lightning flashes, scattered like the fallen on a battlefield" (234)?
2. Explain the relationship of the story's title to the Amichai poem excerpt used as an epigraph.
3. What does Gin dream about the dead woman and her grandmother's cottage?
4. What is the inclusion of details about the House of Dong intended to convey?
5. What is the rhetorical purpose of the narrator's comments about the "bloodless way in which a young man discards his own virginity" (235)?
6. How is the From Here to Eternity love scene evoked ironically when the narrator and Gin are on the beach?
7. In what sense does the narrator mean that, after the night on Oak Street Beach, the dead woman was always "with" him and Gin?
8. On page 233, the narrator describes the girlfriend's mother's car as having "a rosary twined [around] the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs." Describe the tone of this image and explain how it is related to the narrator's later description of unbuttoning his girlfriend's shirt.
9. When the narrator and Gin are on the beach, what does the narrator imagine the people along the Gold Coast doing, and what thematic ideas does his description convey?
10. What is foreshadowed by the page 233 description of their "lover's lane"?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Write an essay in which you analyze the strategies that Dybek uses to build the tension that conveys the narrator's sexual desire. Comment on how the use of these strategies to build tension changes after the discovery of the body on the beach, and why. Use textual evidence to support your claims.
Essay Topic 2
Write an essay that evaluates the narrator's ability to negotiate for what he wants in "We Didn't." How do his age, personality, and circumstances both benefit and hinder him as he tries to negotiate with Gin both before and after the beach scene? Use textual evidence to support your claims.
Essay Topic 3
Dybek borrowed from a famous passage of writing referred to as "Molly Bloom's Soliloquy," which is available online. Research background information on this passage and then read its text. Write an essay in which you demonstrate how and where Dybek's writing in "We Didn't" has been influenced by Molly Bloom's Soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses. Then, based on your background research, make and defend a claim about the appropriateness of this borrowing. Be sure to support your claims with quoted evidence from the text of both "We Didn't" and Ulysses, and cite your sources in MLA format.
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This section contains 1,284 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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